


If You Sing Something, I'll Know You're Awake

by angel_deux



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Based mostly on 5x04 Detour, Bellamy is Mulder and Clarke is Scully ofc, F/M, Mentions of Cancer, Minor/Background Minty, Minor/Background Murven, Mutual Pining, Written during season 2, so the characters are written as being about 400 percent less miserable than they currently are, x-files au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 16:38:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15417138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Bellamy and Clarke are on their way to a partnership communication seminar when they stumble across a case involving missing surveyors, glowing biological matter on trees, and weird animal tracks that may or may not be Bigfoot-related. Of course Bellamy makes them get involved. X-Files AU.





	If You Sing Something, I'll Know You're Awake

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure I wrote this just after the Season 2 finale. I used 5x04 of the X Files as a blueprint, but I definitely didn't follow the plot religiously, so I'm sure there are huge differences. I haven't watched the X Files in years, so I can't tell you exactly what those differences are, but I'm sure they're there.
> 
> Also this has a mostly comedic tone, which is why I finally decided to post it. It's like the antithesis to current canon, I think, which maybe makes it a little goofy?

There might be worse things than being stuck in a car with agents Jordan and Green on the way to an FBI Partnership Communication Seminar, but Bellamy isn’t sure what they could be.

“Last year’s seminar was so baller,” Jasper says, smirking in the rearview at Bellamy’s partner, who puts on a barely convincing grimace of a smile in response before resuming her observation of the second straight hour of nothing but trees and the occasional gas station out the window. “You two ever go to these things, Agent Griffin?”

“No, we don’t. My partner always seems to get sick around this time of year.”

She half grins pointedly at Bellamy, who counters with a deadpan, “Oh, I’m sick this year too. My partner’s just gotten better at being pushy.”

Guilt tripping, more like, but Clarke had made a few good points (like: “Assistant Director Kane kind of hates us, Bellamy” and “we’ve missed every training goal since we started working together, Bellamy” and “remember that time I almost _died of alien cancer_ because of your crusade, Bellamy?” and maybe that last one was just in his head, but it was implied, and it was effective).

“I _thought_ you looked a little under the weather,” Jasper says, and Clarke laughs.

“Yeah, Blake. You look like shit.”

“It’s a stomach thing, so if you wanna just pull over and let me out, I get it. These are nice seats. Leather? Hey did you put down a cleaning deposit, or…?”

“Look, none of us _really_ want to go to a partnership communication seminar,” Monty says. Jasper looks scandalized, and he also looks at Monty, pulling the wheel sharply as he does so. Luckily, they’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Jasper could do donuts for about an hour before another driver showed up to be inconvenienced.

“ _I_ want to go to a partnership communication seminar,” he replies, one hand on his heart for extra drama. Clarke leans over into the middle seat to catch his eye in the rearview. Her blonde hair wafts over that smell that keeps driving Bellamy crazy, the smell of her shampoo, like green apples or something. It’s fantastic.

“Sounds like _you guys_ might need help with your communication,” she says.

“Unlike the two of us, because we’re both very clear on the fact that we’d rather die,” Bellamy agrees. Clarke holds up a fist without looking, and he bumps it dutifully, like he always does, even though he keeps trying to tell her how _lame_ it makes them look.

“Whoa,” Jasper says. Slams on the brakes, sending Bellamy’s face crashing right into that green-apple scented hair, their heads colliding. Jasper seems not to notice. “What’s happening up _here_?”

Red and blue lights flashing ahead. At least ten cop cars in the middle of this backwoods road, and a state trooper is walking forward with his hands up, stopping them.

“Thank _fucking_ god,” Bellamy says.

* * *

“Where’s he going?” Monty asks Clarke. They’re leaning up against the sedan while Jasper attempts to chat up a pretty brunette officer about the basics of this missing person’s search that has the road blocked off for the foreseeable future. They’re already looking at about an hour of extra driving because they’re going to have to drop back to Route 3 and pick up 24 to get around the search zone, but there’s Bellamy, practically jogging into the woods with a few other officers, looking almost giddy. Clarke sighs. She _knows_ that walk. She knows that whole peppy attitude.

“Great,” she mutters. She pushes herself off the car and heads after him. “He found a freaking X-File.”

* * *

Four years ago, Clarke had never even _heard_ of the X-Files. She’d heard of Spooky Blake, the guy whose FBI career had stalled out in spectacular fashion because he suddenly became convinced of the veracity of any and all alien conspiracy theories. He’d been an exemplary agent before that, and she’d been fascinated by his meteoric rise and even more meteoric fall just as much as any of the cadets in her class, but she hadn’t looked too much into it. Some of her more superstitious academy friends likened talking about Blake to that whole Scottish play bullshit.

Clarke wasn’t superstitious.

When they transferred her to the X-Files division to be his partner, it was because they wanted her to prove or disprove the validity of having a unit devoted to investigating unnatural phenomena. But Clarke could read between the lines – it was about her science background and the fact that she’s also a medical doctor: she was tasked with Blake because she was Blake’s opposite, and they thought she would destroy him.

But the thing about Clarke Griffin is that she’s not interested in destruction; she only wants the _truth_.

And it turns out that Bellamy Blake wants the same thing.

* * *

Four years later, she still hasn’t given her superiors anything they can use to shut Bellamy down. And now the bureau has _two_ pain in the ass conspiracy nuts to deal with.

* * *

But their partnership has worked as long as it has because Clarke refuses to concede to Bellamy’s wild theories until there’s some evidence. She knows it frustrates him, but it centers him, too. It keeps him reaching, keeps him investigating every possible angle instead of just accepting whatever theory involves little green men.

Clarke looks at him sometimes and wonders if what her mother said is true: if he’s sucked all the ambition, all the determination out of her. She wanted to run the FBI by the time she was forty, but at this rate she’ll still be chasing fluke-man hybrids and uncovering incestuous cannibal clans until she’s on oxygen.

It sounds a little less like a bad thing each time she and Abby revisit that conversation.

* * *

She’s not smiling now, though, standing in the lush forests in Wherever the Hell They are, America.

“Blake,” she calls, and he turns to look at her as if surprised she made the trip. He points with excitement to something on the ground she can’t see, then holds up a finger to tell her to wait. The sheriff of this little town, an _extremely_ attractive woman with her brown hair in a sharp ponytail, is standing beside him, glaring at him.

“Just a sec, Griffin,” he says. “I’m on to something here.”

Clarke throws up her hands, already out of patience, and heads back in the direction she came, so she misses Sheriff Raven Reyes saying, “um, pretty sure we can handle it from here. We’ve got a couple of missing persons, weird animal tracks, and now some blood. We don’t need FBI on this.”

“Humor me, all right?” Bellamy says with his trademark sideways smirk, but the expression Reyes shoots his way tells him that he’s not going to charm her into letting him in on this case. “Look, my partner and I, we…” he spins, hoping to get Clarke in on this, because sometimes she’s a better fit with the local PD. She knows how to talk to them in a way he never seems to be able to (Clarke says it’s the sarcasm. Says he sounds like a douche to people who don’t know him. He’s not sure how true that is). “Uh. Shit. She’s gone. Well, Agent Griffin and I specialize in these kinds of cases.”

“What, non-cases?” Reyes asks, and Bellamy likes her a lot.

* * *

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says. She shoves her hands into her coat pockets and faces Monty and Jasper, feigning regret. “But I think you should probably go on without us.”

“No way,” Monty scoffs.

“ _What_? We have to!”

“Jasper, there’s a _case_ here! Right, Griffin? Bellamy Blake. On a _case_.”

Jasper catches on, a grin spreading across his youthful face, and he says: “ _Right_. Spooky Blake in action!”

“Hey!” Jasper and Monty’s heads snap toward Clarke, alarmed. She knows people call her the Ice Queen the way they call Bellamy Spooky. Like Bellamy, she doesn’t so much mind the nickname. Also like Bellamy, she hates hearing her partner ridiculed. “Don’t call him that. Agent Blake has done more for this bureau than the two of you combined could even _hope_ to. I’m not letting you sit around and mock him while he tries to help people. Is that clear?”

In the end, Jasper heads off to the seminar alone, hoping to at least get a few hours of partying in before they realize his partner is AWOL. Monty bounces eagerly beside Clarke, and Clarke is already trying to figure out how to ditch him.

“Agent Griffin? Your partner is asking for you.”

She looks up and spots the gorgeous officer who just called her over at the treeline, and she hears Monty’s sharp intake of breath. Officer Miller is tall and dark and gorgeous, with perfectly groomed facial hair and half an eye on Monty already.

“Well that was a freebie,” she mutters.

* * *

She knocks on the door to Bellamy’s hotel room later, displaying her platter of tiny wine glasses and mangled cubes of cheese with the appropriate amount of irony.

“ _Nice_ ,” Bellamy says. “If I had known this dump had room service…”

“Yeah, well. You made me miss my chance to get wasted and inappropriate at a work function.”

“And I know how you love doing that.”

“Mm. I’ll get over it. Maybe. Tiny cheeses?”

“What did you _do_ to these things? Griffin, did you try to cut these with a nail file?”

“The gas station down the street somehow didn’t carry knives. _But_ ,” she hands him his tiny wine glass and clinks it against her own, leans against the desk beside him, facing him, watching the long line of his throat as he throws the drink back. Finds herself smiling and hates herself for it. “There’s a bar. I was thinking I could probably get you drunk enough to attempt karaoke.”

“You’re probably right,” Bellamy says. “Well. You’d probably be right any other night. But we’ve got a live one here.”

“Oh, are you actually gonna tell me what this is about? Instead of waving me off every time I try to ask about it?”

Bellamy looks appropriately sheepish at her not-quite-teasing tone, and he rubs the back of his neck in a way that always makes her want to play with his hair. She _really_ hates herself for that one.

“In my defense, you’re the one who brought Green.”

“You waved me off long before that was an issue, and Green and Officer Miller are currently getting wasted and inappropriate down the hall. I took care of it. Look, Blake, I get that Reyes is hot…”

“Whoa, hey, this isn’t about that.”

“I refuse to accept that you were waving me off for any reason other than wanting to get lucky, because if you were waving me off for that _other_ reason, we might have a problem.”

“No, no. I wasn’t…I was just asking for a second! I was even looking for you! Reyes thinks I’m a fucking idiot.”

“Everyone thinks you’re a fucking idiot.”

“You don’t.”

He says things like that sometimes, things that are soft and earnest and quietly spoken, like questions without the punctuation mark, and they always break her down. She ruffles his hair with affection, her fingers longing to stay and curl there and pull him in for a kiss, but she swallows the urge like she always does, pushing off the desk and flopping back on his bed.

“No, I don’t,” she says. “A little unstable, sure.”

“I’ll take it.”

He smiles at her, and she wonders what exactly he sees. Sometimes it feels like this partnership is a gentle light leading her through the storm, and sometimes it feels like a livewire current whipping the air around her. It doesn’t help that Bellamy can look at her and set her whole being on fire. It’s not even love, she doesn’t think, not just in the romantic sense. And it’s not lust (not _just_ lust). It’s something deeper, some connection between them that drives her to want to do better and be better and solve all the puzzles that the world is trying to keep scattered and incomplete. She wonders if she has anything close to the same kind of effect on him.

(Bellamy thinks the whole world could end if only Clarke was holding his hand when it did.)

* * *

Bellamy was right: local PD takes to Clarke immediately. Mostly this is because Clarke and Raven are both the same level of exasperated when he drags them out to the crime scene in the middle of the night on a hunch about some nocturnal glowing that was spotted by hunters a few weeks back.

“And stop calling it a crime scene,” Raven snaps as she pushes aside a tree branch to let Clarke by. “It’s a disappearance. There’s been no indication that a crime was committed. The blood, the animal tracks…I mean, we’re not exactly looking to stick a cougar in lockup.”

“This is so exciting,” Monty says. Bellamy rolls his eyes over his shoulder at Clarke, his expression blaming her for everything, and she scrunches up her face in return.

“Shut up,” she mutters, pulling up beside him, all but whispering into his ear. “He’s a good guy, and he’s a decent agent. His partner’s the flaky one.”

“You’re telling me Green’s not flaky? He’s smelling the flora, Griffin.”

“The _flora_?”

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not the one smelling it.”

“They’re leaves, Blake. _Flora_. I can’t believe I let you drag me out here in the middle of the night. _Again_.”

“It’s your one weakness as an agent, Griffin,” Bellamy says fondly, sending her a secret smile that makes her stomach clench. “You’d follow me anywhere.”

* * *

Never has that been more apparent than when they’re standing in the middle of a clearing, staring at the fluorescent glow of the smears of biological matter on the trees around them. Raven is laughing, spinning, her arms up in the air, ditching her cynical world weariness for just a minute to bask in the otherworldly glow. But Clarke is thinking radioactivity and airborne illnesses, and who even _knows_ what this shit is, and Bellamy’s asking, “could it be alien?” because of course he’s asking if it’s alien.

“ _Officer Miller_ ,” Clarke growls, storming over to Raven’s handsome deputy, who’s reaching out a hand to touch the bark of the nearest glowing tree. “ _Seriously_?”

“Sorry,” he says quickly, jerking his hand away and taking a few steps back toward Monty, who can’t seem to stop smiling at everything.

“It’s _got_ to be alien,” Bellamy says, giddy, his face beautiful, lit up in blues and greens, and Clarke just sighs and snaps a latex glove on her hand.

“Yeah,” she mutters. “Sure. Whatever.”

They’re all so fascinated by the fluid on the trees that they don’t notice the body until Raven almost trips over it. Clarke feels sorry for being relieved, because glowing trees might be a little out of the realm of reality for most of them, but bodies is what they’re used to, and all three of the tagalongs jump into action, becoming competent professionals once again. Raven takes charge, as she’s used to doing, and Clarke knows better than to try and stop her: they all know she and Bellamy are only still here because Raven’s kind of curious.

“Miller, take Agent Green back and get Collins on the line. We’re gonna need a pickup. And wake up the girls while you’re at it; we’ll need the morgue.”

“And I’ll need something bigger to collect samples with,” Clarke says. “Agent Green, there’s a kit in my luggage. Take my room key.”

“Got it,” Miller says, and then he’s jogging back down the hiking trail, leading Monty by the hand. Raven stands with her hands on her hips, watching Clarke work, watching as Clarke prods the body with a gloved finger, shining her pocket flashlight around the dead man’s injuries.

“See anything interesting?” she asks, crouching down to get a better look. Bellamy’s standing at least twenty feet back, and she glances over her shoulder at him, her mouth twitching up into a smile. “Let me guess: not his thing?”

“Not his thing,” Clarke confirms. “Blake’s squeamish.”

“I told you, I have a stomach thing. My constitution’s naturally weak right now.”

“Right now and every time we find a body. Which is _way_ too often. Do me a favor, Sheriff. Reach into my pocket for my phone? I’m going to want a few pictures of the area. If the sun comes up before Monty comes back, I’ll need a reference point of where the gooey stuff is so I can take my samples.”

“You got it, G-lady,” Raven says, happy to help, and she bounces around the clearing – Raven, Clarke decides, has never walked a day in her life; she bounces – taking pictures of everything. Bellamy finally musters up the fortitude to crouch down about five feet over Clarke’s shoulder.

“What do you think?”

“I’ll need to do a full autopsy before I can give you anything,” she says, but Bellamy knows that means she’s kind of stumped, and he can’t help the smug smile that spreads across his face. Whenever Clarke’s stumped in the field, it means there’s a chance.

“You keep talking like this and I might have to propose,” he says.

“You blow your money on a ring and I’ll turn you down flat.”

“I was thinking of something a little more _us_. Moonrock, maybe. Make it into a necklace for you.”

Clarke smiles over at him, genuine, and it maybe makes his breath stutter a little when she does.

“Not bad, Blake. I might actually take you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He has to duck his head to keep from smiling as goofily as he wants to. Moonrock it is. Once he gets around to actually telling her he’s crazy about her.

She props open the wound that probably killed the man, using the tip of one blue-gloved finger, and she peers into the cavity, frowning.

“More of the glowing matter deep in there,” she says. “Saliva? I guess a creature with glowing saliva wouldn’t be the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen.”

“Especially if it isn’t from this planet.”

“Blake, this is your final warning,” she says, and he chuckles behind her. She pops off her gloves and drops them next to the body, suddenly exhausted. She stands from her crouch, stretching, and looks around for somewhere to sit and wait for Monty and Miller to come back. There’s a log across the clearing that doesn’t have any of the glowing shit on it, and she sits gingerly, relieved when it doesn’t collapse to rot under her weight. Bellamy watches her with naked worry, and he follows her. Hovers. This is the way he is, now, and she’s still not entirely used to it. She’s always been the type to bristle when people care too much about her, and Bellamy cares a lot.

“You okay? Are you tired?” he asks, and she shrugs.

“There’s no use speculating,” she says gently. “Until they get back with my kit, there’s nothing I can do. Might as well take a few seconds.”

“You could always take these pictures,” Raven calls, but she’s joking, and she bounces happily to another tree.

“She needs to rest,” Bellamy says too quickly, and Clarke rolls her eyes at him as he sits beside her, forehead creased perpetually with worry. “I mean it, Clarke. You’re okay, right?”

It’s serious when they use their first names. That’s the unspoken rule. She can blow him off as much as she wants, and he can tell her he’s fine a dozen times in a row despite all the evidence to the contrary, but once _Clarke_ or _Bellamy_ passes their lips, there can’t be any more bullshit.

“It’s just a lack of sleep. You realize it’s the middle of the night, right?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, thoughtful, a little less amused than she thought he would be. “I’m sorry. I guess this could have waited.”

“Eh, we never would have found this place if we’d waited ‘til light.” Clarke shrugs and looks down at her hands. Her nail polish is chipped. She’s not sure why she even bothers with it anymore aside from the routine and giving her hands something to do during the day when Bellamy’s whirling around their tiny office in the FBI’s basement, chattering away about whatever new case he’s sure will lead to answers.

Maybe it’s more than just the time of night that has her feeling exhausted. For all these cases vary, for all there are a million different things in the world that Clarke would never have even guessed about if she hadn’t joined Bellamy on his crusade, there’s a ring of repetition to them all the same. Bellamy will be fervent, will be sure that _this_ is the case that will get him answers about his sister’s disappearance.

It won’t be, though. It never is. Sometimes they get close, maddeningly close, but mostly it’s just tantalizing bits of information. Usually it contradicts whatever they learned _last_ time.

She feels Bellamy’s hand on her back, and she tries not to tense with surprise. She glances over at him and he’s still concerned, still not convinced.

“How long are you going to worry about me out here?” she asks quietly. She’s not sure if it’s low enough to avoid Raven overhearing, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much, anyway. Let Raven hear all she wants to. Bellamy’s hand moves across her back, his arm covering _more_ of her, like even now he’s trying to shield her from harm.

“Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Don’t deflect.”

“A few weeks ago, they told me you’d be lucky if you survived the night.”

“But you saved me,” Clarke reminds him. She hasn’t said it so simply before. One of the things she’s always loved about she and Bellamy’s friendship is that the big things can stay unspoken. But the gratitude and the feelings of almost painful adoration are strong, and she _wants_ to tell him. “You saved me, and I’m okay. Because of you.”

She looks at him directly, challengingly, and she sees his weak smile in return. He looks away, but his hand stays warm and heavy on her back. After a few moments of silence, he starts to rub slow circles, a sigh heaving deep from his chest.

“It’s my fault you…”

“Shut up, Blake.”

“But it’s…”

“Blake.”

“If I hadn’t been so obsessed with…”

“ _Bellamy_ , stop.” He stops, and he reluctantly meets her eyes. (Ice Queen, they call her, but Bellamy’s never understood that. There’s _so much feeling_ in them.) “It was my choice. It’s always been my choice. You know why I was assigned to you. You know I chose not to do what I was assigned to do. You don’t get to take that away from me because you feel guilty.”

Bellamy lets the quiet moment linger, just looking at her. She knows her fight with cancer weighs on him, because he’s right: she never would have been infected if she didn’t choose Bellamy over the orders of her superiors. She never would have vanished for weeks, never would have been held against her will, never would have been purposely infected with an aggressive tumor that nearly killed her before Bellamy managed to bargain for a cure. None of it would have happened.

Bellamy hasn’t seen his sister since she was seven years old, and he’s so sure that she’s still alive that it breaks Clarke’s heart, and if that’s not a noble cause to join, then Clarke isn’t sure she knows one.

“I know I don’t have to say it again. But I’m _here_ , Bellamy. I’m here for everything. No matter how many times I get hit over the head or infected with cancer or kidnapped or shot at. They killed my best friend. They killed Wells. This is my fight now as much as it is yours.”

Bellamy nods, and he bumps his forehead against the side of her head the way he does when he doesn’t know what else to say. She leans into it, grinning sleepily. She’s pretty sure he kisses her hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For smothering.”

“Apology accepted,” Clarke says. “Tentatively. You’re buying me something stronger than shitty gas station wine as soon as we’re out of this fucking place.”

“You got yourself a deal, Griffin.”

* * *

Clarke has for a long time felt more at home in a morgue than anywhere else, and she knows that Bellamy probably deserves the ‘Spooky’ moniker a little less than she does for that tidbit alone. She loses herself in the ritual of the late night autopsy, pulling her hair back and sliding her fingers into tight blue latex gloves and settling the oversized goggles on her face with something like a sigh of relief. Autopsies, forensic investigations, samples of the goo sent off to a lab in Maryland: all of this is what she needs to do.

The one thing she’ll never do for Bellamy is believe in him blindly, and these autopsies prove it to her.

She cuts into the body, muscle memory taking over. She narrates her movements and findings as she does it.

Another thing about the autopsies is that she doesn’t ever think about the cancer when she does them.

* * *

Clarke’s cancer had been a sudden thing, and it had been a manufactured thing, and that made both she and Bellamy so angry that they often got into shouting matches with _each other_ , even though they were the last people they wanted to be fighting against. It reminded Clarke of the beginning, when they couldn’t agree about almost anything.

She’d liked parts of Bellamy from the start, had liked his hero complex and his guilt whenever they couldn’t save everyone. She’d appreciated his dry, bitter humor. But he had been so willing to believe, had _needed_ to believe, and Clarke was there for the truth. She wasn’t there to support only those of Bellamy’s theories that pointed to Octavia being alive and well somewhere. Bellamy could be smug and self-righteous and infuriatingly slow to admit he was wrong, and so in the beginning they had argued.

The cancer had brought that back. They hadn’t fought for years in between; they had become so accustomed to each other, had become so close to each other, and they had forged a partnership that slid so smoothly into place that even Deputy Director Kane stopped bitching so much about them. But the cancer was, in its way, Bellamy’s _fault_ , and during her most hopeless moments, Clarke had resented him for that.

* * *

“There was nothing you could have done,” she said to him once, when she thought it wasn’t long before the end. The tumor had metastasized, and she was lying in a hospital gray-faced and struggling to breathe. She could hear her mother arguing with the night nurse about her chart, and she knew Bellamy didn’t have long before Abby came in and kicked him out.

She was almost glad, because she couldn’t hide it anymore. Bellamy heard the bitterness in her voice. He heard the blame she would _never_ speak aloud.

“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” he said, and she didn’t reply, because what _could_ she say except that it was true? And what good would that do? “Clarke, I want you to say it.”

“Want me to say what?” Clarke asked, exhausted. She closed her eyes for just a second, and found it harder to open them than she had anticipated. When she forced it, she saw Bellamy’s face clouded with despair, and she had to look away. She hated how his guilt made her feel, because no matter how much he hurt for her lost time, it would never compare to what _she_ was feeling. She was dying because of him, and she didn’t _want_ to hate him for it. He was her best friend. She loved him. She didn’t want to die with anything less than that.

“I want you to tell me the truth.”

The truth was that Clarke shouldn’t have been kidnapped by Dax. Bellamy had fallen into Dax’s delusion, because Dax had talked about being abducted, had talked about seeing a girl with long brown hair who couldn’t stop crying out for her brother. Bellamy had fallen for it, and he had let his guard down, and in the end, Clarke had been taken. She remembered nothing of those lost weeks, but she remembered Bellamy’s shattered face when she finally saw him again, and she remembered how he could barely look at her for days afterward because he was afraid of what she would say.

She had said, “just don’t do it again”, and that had been enough. They had grown closer. Bellamy hovered a little more, but he’d always been kind of a hoverer anyway (hard to avoid when he talked so quietly and was so much taller than her), and Clarke kind of liked it.

Then she found the implant, and the cancer was diagnosed, and there was this whole grand fucking government conspiracy that Clarke couldn’t muster up the energy to care about because the important thing was that she wasn’t going to live past her next birthday, because she was dying. Whatever had happened to her in those missing weeks, it was going to kill her. And it was Bellamy’s fault that she had been taken in the first place.

“The truth is that I wouldn’t change any of it for a thousand more years on this planet, Bellamy,” she whispered, and that was the truth as much as the blame was. He sighed and leaned forward until his forehead was on the mattress beside her, and she reached out and ran her fingers through his black curls. Why not, right? She was dying anyway.

“I’m going to fix this,” Bellamy said, voice muffled by the fabric. Clarke laughed a little, but found herself blinking back surprised tears.

“Run around all you want. _Try_ all you want. But I just…I’d like you to be here when it gets closer, if that’s okay. I want to see you before I go.”

Bellamy looked up at her with a bitten back sob, his eyes red and puffy with tears.

“I’ll be here until the end. You know that.”

* * *

Of course, that hadn’t been necessary, because he’d moved heaven and earth to save her. And by the end of the following day, she was cured.

Everyone called it a miracle. Only Clarke, Bellamy, and Deputy Director Kane knew the truth.

* * *

“What can you tell me?”

Bellamy stands in the doorway, hands shoved deeply into his pockets. She knows it’s a defense mechanism; he hates the morgue. Hates the autopsies. Has a grudging respect tinged with revulsion for the ease with which she can carve up a human being and splay their insides out.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“ _Nothing_.”

She rips the bloodied gloves off and tosses them toward the trash. Misses, and they splatter when they hit the floor. Bellamy grimaces, and Clarke wants to throw something for just a second. Instead, she cleans up, controls her temper.

“You gotta give me something, Griffin.”

“I would if I could. There’s nothing you don’t already know. The luminescent matter was all over the wounds, but until we get those samples back from the lab…”

“Right.”

“And that could take days.”

“Right.”

“He died from blood loss, but I think that was pretty apparent already. So again, I say: nothing. I mean, I guess we can infer that whatever killed him didn’t eat his body afterward, so it clearly wasn’t a creature looking out for food. Or maybe it just doesn’t like the taste of people. Maybe it’s a land shark. That would be new.”

“Right.”

She finally looks at Bellamy and sees that he’s staring down at the ground, trying hard not to look both disappointed and nauseas. She takes pity on him: it’s always hard for him to live the moment when he realizes that a case isn’t going to be a direct line to Octavia.

“We’re finished here. Let’s head outside.”

She says her thanks to the morgue technician, Harper, who has been waiting out in the lobby, and then she and Bellamy head out to the street. It’s impossibly dark; in the middle of nowhere, apparently there aren’t too many night owls. Clarke looks up and stares at the stars above them, beautiful without the light pollution she’s used to in DC. Gasps with amazement when one streaks across the sky.

“Did you see that?” she asks, turning to smile at him, and he’s smiling wistfully back at her, his head still angled sharply upward.

“Wish for anything?”

“Mm. But I think it invalidates the wish if I tell you,” she replies. “Blake…”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m serious. Maybe it’s not alien, but it’s still an X-File, and you can’t check out on me. I _need_ you. I am _not_ prepared to go chasing through the woods after some glow-in-the-dark wolves or whatever…”

“Wolves, huh?”

“Well, the wounds were consistent with an animal attack. I’m open to suggestions.”

“I kinda like wolves, actually,” Bellamy says. On impulse, he drapes his arm over Clarke’s shoulder as they walk back to the squad car Reyes lent them for the night. “Hopefully it’s not bears.”

“Yeah, _again_ ,” Clarke mutters. “At least these ones probably aren’t genetically altered by a genuine mad scientist.”

“What, you think these would be _naturally occurring_ glow-in-the-dark bears?”

“No, I’m _hoping_ they’re naturally occurring glow-in-the-dark bears. Scientists who create new forms of life and let them run wild are just the _worst_.”

“All right, true, you got me there.”

* * *

The Reyes thing is a total hunch.

He and Clarke spend most of the next day trapped inside by a rain storm that drenches the entire town and turns it this gorgeous, vibrant green that is better viewed from behind the glass of a window pane because it also brings the temperature down to next to nothing, and everything seems unpleasantly damp. Clarke uses her laptop to research animal bites, pulling out her reading glasses to pore over the hits she gets on the FBI database. Bellamy’s going through his own database, looking for any abductee experiences that involve glow-in-the-dark fluids. It’s easy to get distracted, though, with Clarke always putting her glasses on or taking them off, looking insanely gorgeous no matter what she does, so he’s a little off his game, slow to answer her questions and vague when he does, and she gets annoyed in response, refusing to speak to him.

They have a mostly quiet, unpleasant lunch, and then they head back to work. Around three, he finally gives up on his database and concedes defeat, and he starts trying to hit Clarke in the head with little balled up post-it notes, which eventually gets her talking, and by the time dinner rolls around, she’s lying on top of the covers in her pantsuit, asleep.

Bellamy drapes a blanket over her, and then there are no more distractions, and that’s when he thinks about the Reyes thing.

* * *

It started back at the nature trail the night before, in the glowing woods, with the floppy-haired deputy who came jogging up the path to help them move the body and stopped breathless when he saw Clarke. She had smiled back at him, and Bellamy had rolled his eyes in unison with Raven, who had to clear her throat awkwardly to get Deputy Collins to focus.

“You want my advice?” she asked once Clarke was helping Finn load the body into the bag. “Never date her.”

“What? Why not?” Bellamy asked, roughly half a second before saying, “and who says I _want_ to date her?”

“Your eyes, your body language, your dumb angsty face every time she’s not touching you. Take your pick. You want to date her.”

“Shut up,” Bellamy said. It didn’t help.

“The ‘why not’ is simple: when it fails, it crashes and burns. And then you’re forced to watch her hit on every passably attractive person who blows through here, because this is a small town and there aren’t many strangers. And maybe one of you’s already fucking the bartender, and maybe you’re getting ready to move in with him, and maybe you’re perfectly happy with that. But that doesn’t make it any easier to watch the other one turn the charm on someone else.”

“Well, there were way too many specific details in that. Considering Griffin and I live in DC and not a town with only _one bartender_ , I have a hunch you’re talking about you and Shaggy over there?”

“Yep.”

“Kid needs a haircut.”

“Yep.”

“ _And_ he needs to take his hands off my partner, holy shit.” He started forward, glowering as Finn tucked Clarke’s hair behind her ear with a bashful smile. Raven stopped him with a casually-jutted out arm against his chest.

“Relax, Romeo. She’s not interested.”

Bellamy deflated. Not because she was right, but because she was wrong, and because it wasn’t like he had never seen Clarke get lucky on a case before. That guy Sterling in Montana. That ex-cultist Lexa who helped them out in Louisiana. It was just _different_ now, after the whole cancer thing and the terrible realization that he was in love with her, and it sucked because he knew he had no right to interfere but he kind of wanted to smash Collins’ face in, anyway.

“She _looks_ pretty fucking interested,” he mumbled.

Raven swayed closer, smiling smugly up at him, her eyes narrowed with mocking amusement.

“Yeah, not really. She can’t turn her face off around you, either.”

“Are there really that few people in this town? You could do better.”

“Like you?”

“Hell yeah, like me.”

“Hard pass, but I’ll keep the compliment. Bartender, remember? He knows what he’s doing. And to answer your question: our graduating class was less than a hundred people, and most of them had the good sense to get out of here when they could. Finn and I have been friends since diapers. It’s a little more complicated than that. Anyway things should probably change soon.”

“Why’s that?”

“Town council is _finally_ moving forward with this development project that’s been stalling for a decade. We’re going to get a few new stores, a few apartment complexes. They’re clearing out this area in a few months to make way for some kind of factory that’s going to bring in jobs. Make this town more than just a drive-through gas stop.”

“And make your job a whole lot more complicated. You sure you ready for that?”

Raven glared at him, remembering that she thought he was an idiot, and said, “you better believe it.”

* * *

And maybe most of that wasn’t relevant, but Bellamy can’t help but think about all of it as he pulls into the parking lot of the sheriff’s station. He’s glad to see that the lights are still on in Raven’s office, even though it’s long past quitting time. He had a feeling she would be here. She’s got a dead body in her town and a mystery animal killing off her people. She doesn’t seem like the type to take a break in moments like this. And hopefully she’ll be able to tell him exactly where development started on those new buildings.

He stops the car and opens the door, and from inside the building, he hears her scream.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but suddenly he’s regretting sneaking out without waking Clarke.

Three shots in rapid succession, and one of the windows nearest to Bellamy’s car shatters, expelling something enormous and hairy. As Bellamy watches, it rolls across the grass and then springs to its feet, and now it’s Bellamy’s turn to yell ( _yell,_ not scream, it’s _definitely_ not a scream) because the thing has about fifteen legs and is covered in coarse brown hair, and as Bellamy watches, its color fades and its shape distends, and then it’s practically invisible except for this horrifying, disorienting blur of motion that takes off into the trees behind the sheriff’s station.

“What the fuck. What the _fuck_ ,” Bellamy’s chanting, jogging toward the front door with his gun out. He’s _not_ chasing that thing into the woods alone. “ _Reyes_?”

He shouts from around the door, mostly because he’s not sure that Raven won’t shoot him if he just pops in, and he hears her relieved sobs as he rounds the corner and finds her mopping blood off her head with her sleeve, her ponytail in a disarray and a whole chunk of her black hair torn out of her head by the roots.

“Did you see it?” she asks, eyes steely but still tear-filled from the pain. “Did you fucking _see that thing_?”

“If you’re talking about the giant hairy spider that flung itself out the window and then turned invisible and ran off into the woods? Yeah. That, uh, that would have been tough to miss.”

* * *

By the time he gets Raven sloppily patched up, and by the time they make it back to the motel to wake up Clarke, she’s gone. Bellamy gets a sinking feeling in his chest as he searches the room for any sign of struggle.

“She took her wallet,” Raven points out.

“Where could she possibly be going in the middle of the night with no car?” Bellamy snaps, and he tries calling her again but she still doesn’t pick up. Raven makes a bit of a face as she considers.

“I’m thinking maybe the car wasn’t an issue,” she says apologetically.

* * *

The bar is a lot nicer than Bellamy was expecting, and some of that tight, uncomfortable feeling dissipates. At least it’s not some seedy dive bar, and at least there’s a bit of a crowd.

“No wonder everywhere else looks dead,” he says. “Every single person in town is here.”

“Oh good, so you’re still an asshole despite all that bonding earlier.” She strolls up to the bar and raps her knuckles on the wood to catch the bartender’s attention. “Hey, dickhead. Collins here?”

The bartender rolls his eyes companionably at her and slides her a shot of whiskey across the bar. He eyes the bandage on her head, but Raven shrugs, and he nods, the same sort of unspoken checking-in that Clarke and Bellamy do, and it makes Bellamy’s chest hurt a little.

“He’s in the party room with Miller and some suits.” The bartender registers Bellamy’s presence and quirks an eyebrow. “What is it, some weird G-man theme night? Where are you finding these guys?”

“Relax, Murph,” Raven says with good cheer, downing her drink and slamming it on the bar with a sharp smile. “You know I’ve only got room in my heart for one man.”

“Are you saying _me_ , or are you saying Jack Daniels? Because I don’t think either of us can handle you,” Murphy replies dryly, and Raven blows him a kiss as she starts walking toward the back.

“That self-awareness is why I keep coming back for more, Murphy,” she shouts, nodding in greeting to a few people who call out to her. As an aside to Bellamy, she mutters, “that and the _fantastic_ sex.”

“I’m learning way more about this town than I need to,” Bellamy laments.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting when Raven nudges open the door to the back room, but he’s definitely _not_ expecting Monty to be on stage warblingly delivering a drunken ballad to an awestruck Deputy Miller and Jasper and – _great_. Jasper’s back.

“Hey! Spooky!” Jasper yells as soon as he sees Bellamy. “Finally!”

Bellamy spots Clarke sitting next to Finn in a booth that doesn’t quite seem big enough for both of them, though it could probably fit at least three more people. Clarke’s head whips around, and her eyes narrow on him. Bellamy had walked in here prepared to be angry that she hadn’t answered his calls, prepared to be angry that she hadn’t left a note, but his anger dies in his throat as he sees it reflected back at him with a tenfold intensity, and he remembers that he’s not the only one who has a right to be pissed.

“Oh good,” she drawls, leaning her arm back over the booth. “Blake’s here. Sorry I didn’t invite you. Couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I had to ask Reyes about something,” he says, his tone protesting his innocence, though Clarke’s was so even and unweighted that he feels like a defensive fool.

“Of course you did,” Clarke replies sweetly, and Bellamy opens his mouth to protest, but Monty hits a note higher than the microphone can handle, and it squeals out a discordant sound that makes everyone flinch.

“Can we talk outside?” Bellamy asks.

“Why?” Clarke replies, a growl of a word that tells him she’s at the very end of her patience with him.

“ _Clarke_.”

She gives him a look that tells him exactly how she feels about him using her first name against her at this moment in particular, but she gets up from beside Finn and puts down her drink. Finn grabs her hand briefly and says something in a low voice, and Bellamy takes half a step forward before Clarke shakes Finn off, looking affronted by the brief touch.

“Like I told you,” Raven says, sing-songy and bright. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

* * *

They’re out in the parking lot, and it’s freezing, and Bellamy keeps running his fingers through his hair, making it stick up and probably look ridiculous, and he wants to yell at her almost as much as he wants to apologize.

“Look,” he says.

“You _left_ me there.”

“You were asleep.”

“And that makes it okay?”

“No, I just…I mean, it kind of…”

“ _Bellamy_.”

“No. You’re right. I should have woken you up.”

“Maybe Kane was right. Maybe we _do_ need that communication seminar.”

“ _Hey_!” Bellamy snaps, his voice too serious to be anything but mostly joking. “Don’t talk like that.” She cracks a half-smile but takes a half-step back toward the bar at the same time.

“I’m going back in in three seconds if you don’t explain.”

“I had a sudden hunch, and I thought it was just going to be a quick chat with Reyes. I thought I’d let you sleep. I figured it’d probably end up being nothing. It wasn’t because of…it wasn’t why you think.”

“Blake, I just…”

“They’re giant furry spiders.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well maybe not spiders. It was a spider for a second. A giant, hairy spider. But then it was mostly invisible. And before it got to that stage, it looked like it was shifting back into dude shape, so I think we’re dealing with a shapeshifter that can also turn invisible.”

Clarke sighs and looks at him with the expression that she makes whenever she’s remembering the promising FBI career that she gave up to follow him around and listen to him say shit like this.

“Fine,” she says. “What are we going to do about it?”

* * *

It’s not that Clarke doesn’t believe him about the spider monsters. Well, she doesn’t. But she doesn’t think it’s totally impossible, which is more than he can say for Deputy Collins.

“It was dark, and you were freaked out,” Collins is saying to Raven the next morning as they walk up to Clarke and Bellamy, who are already waiting at the nature trail. “It could have been anything. A stray dog.”

“Are you _serious_?” Raven snaps, and she and Finn stop walking to argue it out, setting a really good tone for the rest of the day.

Bellamy rolls his eyes to Clarke.

“Remind you of anyone?” he asks. Take four years off, and that’s you, princess.”

“If you call me that one more time…”

“What, Collins can call you princess, but I can’t?”  

“Collins was being a condescending jerk.”

“I think he was going for charming.”

“And, like you, he failed spectacularly.”

“Well, I’m keeping it. He doesn’t get to call you princess, because it’s a solid nickname for you, and you’re my partner, and I claim first dibs on it.”

“I hate every decision that led me to this moment,” Clarke mutters as Raven and Finn finally start walking again, both looking murderously hungover and upset. Bellamy can’t help but be a little cheerier for it – he hadn’t been in much of a drinking mood last night, after the spider thing. Clarke almost drowned him in the toilet this morning for being too bright-eyed.

“If I’m right about this, you’ll thank me,” he says.

“I seriously doubt that.”

“How often do we actually close a _case_ , Griffin?” Bellamy asks teasingly. “If I’m right, we’re about to close a big one.”

He knows Clarke will go for that – she’s always been a suckup to authority, and Kane’s constant reminders that they’re the worst closers have always rankled her. She doesn’t admit it, though. She refuses to look at him, just greets their fellow law enforcement officers with a smile that doesn’t even bother to hide the headache.

“You’re wearing _that_?” Raven asks. She’s carrying a backpack, dressed in hiking shorts and boots like some kind of Lara Croft clone. She even has an intricate braid woven along her scalp and through her ponytail. Bellamy wonders how she did it herself, then is forced to imagine the bartender from last night doing it for her, so when he answers it _might_ be a little defensive.

“We always wear this,” he says. Clarke rolls her eyes.

“What Blake _means_ is that we planned for a weekend stay at a professional conference. We didn’t exactly pack for hiking.”

Raven eyes their matching suits while her lip curls into what Bellamy would probably describe as a ‘disdainful smile’, and she shrugs.

“Hey, if you think you can keep up…”

“We have _sneakers_ , Reyes,” Bellamy mutters, still a little punchy.

“Yeah. Noticed. They look dumb,” Raven laughs. She jerks her head to the path, turning her body along with it, and they follow her. “So where we headed, anyway?”

“Past the glowstick clearing.”

“What’s out there?”

“Hopefully not more of the hairy spider things.”

“The coyotes or whatever,” Finn murmurs to Clarke, and Bellamy feels a stinging resentment when Clarke gifts Finn with a private laugh.

“Right. The fucking coyotes or whatever,” he snaps. He doesn’t look at Clarke again after that.

* * *

“Do you have any theories?”

It’s been about three hours, and they’re way past the glowing clearing, and Bellamy’s tense and annoyed because they haven’t seen any signs of life and they’re reaching the end of the development zone that he was so sure would provide answers. Clarke’s voice is way weaker than she wants it to be, because she feels terrible, and she’s so used to Bellamy fucking up and having to ask for her forgiveness that she genuinely doesn’t know how to talk to him when she’s on the other side of it.

“I have a lot of theories,” he says, obviously grumpy. Raven and Finn are strolling ahead, chatting civilly for now, and Bellamy and Clarke are far enough back that Clarke knows it’s probably the only time she’s going to get to talk to him like this for a while.

“So lay them on me, Blake. Hit me with your best.”

“Well it’s not coyotes.”

“Blake.”

He glances at her finally, his jaw clenched, and she reaches out to rest her hand on his jacket, pulling his attention.

“It’s not coyotes,” he says again.

“I’m sorry.”

“Mhm.”

“Shut up. I mean it. He’s harmless.”

“Collins?”

“He’s just trying to impress me.”

“And you, what? You want to be impressed?”

“No. I just feel bad. And he’s sweet. And, you know what? Even if I _was_ looking to be impressed? What about that sheriff in Iowa? Or Doctor Echo? Or that woman who took…”

“Okay! Shut up, I get it.”

“You don’t have any right to tell me how to act on a case.”

“I know that, princess.”

“I’m going to fucking _murder_ Collins for thinking of that nickname. Theories. Now.”

“Fine. You know the Bigfoot legends, right?”

“I’m going back to the motel.”

“No, no, no, wait. Stop, stop. I’m not saying it’s _actually_ Bigfoot.”

“Well that’s a relief.”

“Sasquatches are much more partial to the…”

“Oh my fucking god.”

“I’m saying that in its human, furry, non-spider form, it looked an awful lot like Bigfoot. And then it turned invisible.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Which would explain why no one’s ever been able to actually track down a sasquatch, despite their supposed prevalence.”

“Please tell me you have an actual…”

“Okay, okay. Squatch sightings…”

Hands flung dramatically in the air: “ _Squatch_ sightings!”

“…are always in heavily wooded areas. Always in places that humanity hasn’t touched. They don’t like us. They don’t want to be around us. And Reyes was telling me the other day that this whole area is going to be wiped out to make room for an expansion project that’s going to bring businesses to the area. Which means a lot less ground for these things to cover. So I’m thinking: what if they’re only making themselves known because people are moving into their territory? Reyes said that they had a few surveyors go missing up in this area a couple of weeks ago. Everyone assumed they just got lost off the path somehow and wound up dying from exposure.”

“And so you’re saying…”

“I’m saying that people see things all the time that they rationalize as something else. So these shapeshifters, or whatever, if someone saw one through the trees, maybe they thought it was Bigfoot! And I checked, I did _research_ , which should make you proud, by the way: this area has had fifty-three documented Bigfoot sightings in the past fifteen years. They even had one of those shows come out and take a look.”

“Did they find anything?”

“Don’t give me that look, Griffin. I’m just saying: there’s something out here. I _saw_ it. Raven saw it.”

“Bigfoot.”

“No! Will you listen to…stop laughing.”

“I can’t.”

“Griffin…”

“I mean, this is just perfect, isn’t it? You interrupt what was supposed to be our only stress-and-weird-monster free weekend of the past four years to go hiking because some hunter went missing and there were some weird tracks in the woods, and it turns out that we’re hunting _Bigfoot_! Because of course we are. Because this is my life and I…”

Then, a shout from up ahead.

Bellamy’s in the middle of composing a clever retort, so he takes a second to register why Clarke suddenly takes off running, yanking her gun out of her holster as she goes. Raven is charging through the woods ahead, arms flinging around as she casts about in the underbrush for her deputy.

“Raven? What happened?”

“He was right here! He was right in front of me! I saw him. He just _vanished_. Like something pulled him down. Finn, if you’re playing a _fucking_ trick on us _…_ ”

“He got ahead of you,” Clarke says, dread pooling low in her stomach. “Didn’t he?”

“He said he had to pee. He was just going to pull off the trail to…”

Clarke whirls around, her breath catching in her throat.

“Bellamy!”

Bellamy jogs into sight, black curls flopping with every step, eyes big and confused over the long grass.

“You okay, Griffin?” he asks. And then he’s gone.

“ _No_!” Clarke screams, charging after him. She hears Bellamy yell, a hoarse, ragged cry of pain, and she careens through the bushes and flings herself forward at the sound. There’s a hole in the ground where she knows there wasn’t one before, and Bellamy is being dragged down into it. She grabs one of his hands, her other reaching beyond him into the hole and firing blindly, aiming around his legs, hoping to at least scare the thing into letting go. It’s strong; she can feel it pulling Bellamy deeper as Bellamy desperately clutches her wrist with both hands. Finally, at the third shot, it releases Bellamy’s ankle, and he’s able to scramble up and into her arms, tackling her flat back onto the dirt and clawing his own gun out of his holster to point behind them at the hole.

Except the hole is gone. There’s nothing there.

And Raven’s gone too.

* * *

“I knew something like this would happen,” Bellamy says. Clarke snorts. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

“It was a shitty impression.”

“You knew it was supposed to be you _immediately_. That’s the hallmark of a great impression.”

Clarke glares over her shoulder at him. Bellamy’s wrapped in a blanket they filched from Raven’s abandoned backpack, but he’s still shivering: shock, Clarke thinks. His ankle’s broken, and though she did what she could for a splint, it’s a bad break. He needs medical attention. He needs blankets. He needs a fire.

Except it’s been raining so much, and the forest here is still soaked, every piece of wood damp to the touch, and trying to light a fire has gotten her nothing but frustration and mounting panic.

She knows she should be grateful: they’re alive, and they’re together. So far, the quasi-Bigfoots haven’t come back. Bellamy’s not getting any worse, and Raven packed a blanket and enough snacks to last them a little while, so they might be able to survive the night. Then it should be a simple matter of dragging Bellamy’s ass back to civilization and calling Kane for backup, like they should have done in the beginning.

“Well, the fire’s a bust,” she says, crawling back over to the fallen log where she left her partner. He’s curled in on himself, and she props herself against the log beside him, pulling him gently so he can rest his head in her lap. When he makes a noise of protest, she shushes him and starts running her fingers through his hair. He sighs, defeated.

“We need to keep watch.”

“I can keep watch. You need to sleep.”

“We both need to sleep.”

“Who’s the doctor here, Blake?”

“When are you gonna stop pulling that card?”

“When you graduate from med school. Go to sleep.”

“It’d be easier if you weren’t doing this very confusing thing you’re doing. This…is this snuggling? This thing.”

“Body heat, Blake. You need to stay warm.”

“Oh. Right. I thought a more effective way was, you know, take off all your clothes and spoon inside a sleeping bag.”

“If only we had a sleeping bag, you might get lucky,” Clarke says dryly, and that earns her a sleepy laugh. Bellamy’s struggling to stay awake, but he’s fading quickly, and she’s relieved. One of his hands curls absently around her kneecap.

“You should sing something.”

“There’s a reason no one has ever said that to me before in my life.”

“I’m not asking for my own aural pleasure. I’m saying you need to stay awake.”

“I’m a trained FBI agent. You think I can’t handle a stakeout?”

“With me in your lap, tempting you to sleep? No way can you handle it. Admit it: I’m super cuddly right now. I bet I _look_ super cuddly.”

“You have your moments,” Clarke chuckles, twirling one of his curls absently around her finger.

“If you sing something, I’ll know you’re awake,” Bellamy insists. Clarke sighs, delicate but annoyed and exhausted. For a second, he thinks she’s going to ignore him. But then she clears her throat and starts a massively out-of-key rendition of “Hey Mickey” that has Bellamy laughing himself back to consciousness for a minute.

“If you’re just gonna laugh at me…”

“No, no it’s good,” Bellamy insists, nestling down closer, nudging at her hand with his head like some kind of overgrown cat, sighing with contentment when she goes back to playing with his hair. He _loves_ her. “It’s a good choice.”

“Good night, Bellamy,” Clarke says softly. Bellamy closes his eyes and listens to her sing, and he falls asleep with a smile on his face for the first time in fifteen years.

* * *

In the morning, there’s a lot of running around and shooting, and there’s a major scare on both their parts when Clarke gets pulled into a hole in the ground and Bellamy opts to throw his wounded body in after her – which only makes her angry because _both_ of them being killed by shapeshifting Bigfoot monsters doesn’t help anyone at all – but in the end, Clarke was right, because Clarke’s always right, and Agent Monty Green comes through.

Bellamy thinks he might actually start crying when he hears the gunshots, when he sees the advancing shapeshifter fall to the ground, when he looks up and sees Monty standing above the hole, gun clutched in unshaking hands. He goes to grab Clarke’s hand, or hug her, or _something,_ but she’s already kneeling down next to Raven and Finn, who are unconscious but alive in the creatures’ lair, and it’s one of those rare cases when _everyone lives_ , and Bellamy can’t stop smiling.

The paramedics help them all back to the road, where there are ambulances and medical supplies and blankets for all of them, and Bellamy might actually shed a relieved tear before he can shove it back. Raven’s bartender boyfriend is demanding and frantic as he insists the paramedics attend to her first, and she tells him to fuck off, so Bellamy’s pretty sure she’s going to be fine. Even Finn seems mostly dazed and weak from bloodloss, but not really all that bad off considering he was in a Bigfoot lair for a whole night.

Monty and Deputy Miller are ecstatic to have been involved, and Jasper won’t stop enviously complaining about the fact that he tripped on a log and missed most of the action – which was, admittedly, pretty blink-or-you’ll-miss-it stuff. Clarke is so grateful to Monty and Miller that she plays their involvement up, giggling as she watches Jasper’s face get more and more red with jealous fury. There’s an edge to her laughter, though. He pulls her aside as soon as he doesn’t think it’ll feel weird.

“Blake, I thought I told you to wait with the ambulance,” she says, her tone disappointed but her smile still so relieved. He gets it; they’ve been doing this for four years, after all. He knows acutely what it feels like to almost lose her. He knows the nervy, jangling alarm bells that follow something like this.

“Sorry. I just…you look a little unravely, you know?”

She smiles softly at him and finally stops resisting his gentle tug.

“You’re right.” She pushes him gently back into a seated position on the back of the ambulance (“I’ve gotten used to it. See?” he’d said when she tried to get him to stop walking on his ankle, earning a truly epic eye roll). “But I told you to stop walking around. You’ll be off it for weeks anyway. No sense in making it worse, is there?”

“Probably not. But you need to rest too. You haven’t slept all night. You hit your shoulder pretty hard when you fell in the hole; I saw you favoring your arm when you were climbing back out. I notice these things. Don’t give me that look.”

“No, sorry,” Clarke laughs. When he reaches out, she doesn’t pull away, and he tugs her beside him. She sits down slowly, because she doesn’t know how to relax, and Bellamy doesn’t take his arm off her shoulders until she’s fully seated. He starts to pull back, but she makes a noise of protest so quiet he almost isn’t sure it’s real, and she rests her head boldly on his shoulder. He tightens his grip, leaning the side of his head against hers. He likes moments like this, the quiet before and after their biggest triumphs and failures both, when they can just be themselves and let everything else fade away. It has a centering effect, a grounding effect. “I wish they’d just leave us alone for like an hour,” Clarke says, mirroring his thoughts exactly. “I wish they’d just leave us alone and let us sleep exactly like this.”

One of these days he’s going to remind her that they don’t need a near death experience to get close to each other like this, but it’s not going to be today.

“I’m with you on that. Though I _also_ kind of wish they’d hurry up because someone’s probably going to have to take a look at this ankle sometime soon, right?”

Clarke laughs and nods.

“Reyes and Collins are worse off. You didn’t exactly give them the impression of needing urgent care, what with your insistence on showing off to everyone who doesn’t give a shit.”

“You give a shit.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t impressed.”

Bellamy shakes his head against Clarke’s, heaving a dramatic sigh that has her chuckling sleepily.

“Liar,” he says. He lets a few more quiet moments pass. “You know what the one good thing about this case is?”

But she doesn’t answer. She’s already asleep. Bellamy smiles and tucks the blanket tight around her shoulders, closing his eyes. He knows they won’t have long before one of the EMTs comes over to talk to him, and Clarke will hover over them, offering opinions and reminding everyone that she’s a medical doctor. And then it’s the next case, and the next disappointment, and the next missed opportunity to tell Clarke exactly what she means to him.

But for as long as this respite lasts, he will allow himself to be just a guy sitting in the back of an ambulance with the girl he’s kind of in love with, feeling pretty fucking great.


End file.
